


And Flowers in His Hair

by beaubete



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-08
Updated: 2013-03-08
Packaged: 2017-12-04 15:17:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/712195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beaubete/pseuds/beaubete
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bond comes to after a disastrous fight in the Underground's tunnels only to find that everything's different now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And Flowers in His Hair

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by some fascinating websites I've been reading about abandoned Tube stations and a frankly gorgeous picture of Ben Whishaw wearing flowers.

Bond’s fingers touch, skim the wall. There’s crumbling paint there; he’s probably concussed. His mouth feels dry, fuzzed over and thick, and when he tries to shake the cobwebs from his head he actually sees stars. His earpiece is long gone, shattered in the fight. He’s somewhere in the underground, one of the deep tunnels with tonnes of rock and earth and asphalt above him. He shivers, retches, and drags himself up by the nails that are scrabbling against the painted tiles. One of the abandoned stations, then, painted dark so it won’t stand out as the trains hurtle through the black. There’s no platform, just dust and dirt and rubbish beneath his feet. He’s.

The footsteps catch him and he turns, but with his eyes dilated from the pain and dark, he can’t see. He’s been placed here with care, only now remembers tripping, staggering across the rails into the tunnels after the man he’d been chasing had cracked him in the head with a tremendous pipe. His gun is gone now; he reaches for his holster anyway.

“You should sit down,” the person approaching says. He’s got a lovely voice that seems to float, unconnected to an actual person until the slender frame approaches, fading out of the gloom: a transient, youngish, with loose, dirty clothes and dark, soulful eyes. “I’ve done what I could for you—if you’d died, they’d have come looking for you—but you need to rest.”

“Where am I?” Bond asks, patting the wall with both hands before his knees give out and he sinks to the ground.

“South Kentish,” the boy says. His tones are posh; the neighborhood is posh. He sounds like a public school toff and looks like he hasn’t bathed in months. There’s a faint odor coming off him, but it’s not the sour smell he’s expecting. He smells like flowers.

“Near King’s Cross, then, and I ought to get going,” Bond says, struggling to drag himself up again.

“Don’t make me stop you,” the boy says quietly. Bond almost doesn’t hear him, but his legs give out again and he slumps against the brick and tile, exhausted.

“I think I need to go to hospital,” Bond manages weakly. “I—”

“—should be dead right now,” the boy says. His voice is apologetic, if his face is stern. Bond reaches up to touch the hem of his long parka and catches just the barest feel of weave coarser than his eyes belie before the boy drifts away from him.

“You’ve helped me,” Bond remembers, and his fingers tremble when he raises them to touch what ought to be a frightful lump on the back of his head. The boy stops him, looks sad. “Who are you?”

“You may call me Quainton,” the boy says, and Bond frowns. The name plucks at his memory, but he’s too addled. 

“Bond. James Bond,” Bond tells him, offering his hand, but Quainton’s face is pained.

“I already have too much responsibility for you,” he says, and he looks almost offended. Bond looks at him, but Quainton doesn’t explain. “It will make things simpler, I suppose.”

“Simple is good,” Bond agrees, shifting on the ground. His suit is ruined, bloodstained and matted with dirt. He picks at the lapels with a frown of disgust. “Is this one of the stations with a functioning loo?” he asks, and Quainton grins.

“No, but I know where one is. You’ll have to follow me,” he says, offering a slim hand. Bond takes it, dizziness an afterthought at the cool touch of Quainton’s skin. Then there are endless stairs and stairs until he feels like they must be climbing into the sky. They stop on the inside of a service door; through it, Bond can hear voices, chatter and movement and civilians going about their daily lives, and below it, Quainton murmurs, “You will not leave my side, James Bond, or let go of my hand without my permission.” Before he can wonder if the bloodstains will draw more attention than he’s looking for, Quainton yanks him through the door, pulling brusquely for the toilets. Bond follows obediently, tethered to him by their tenuous grasp. 

There’s no one in the small room, thankfully, to see him come in hand-in-hand with someone who, in the sharp, cold light of the tube station restroom, looks significantly younger than him. Quainton opens his mouth to speak but shuts it, and Bond throws him a curious look before turning to the sinks to do what he can. The jacket is ruined; there’ll be no saving it. He shucks it and drops it into the bin. Thankfully the shirt beneath is fine, perhaps a fine spattering of rusty drops—already well dried, the color set, and Bond wonders for the first time how long he was out—but otherwise unscathed. He can’t lose the trousers, but the filth there is less blood and more dirt. There’s not much he can do about it. He’s splashing water on his face to remove the worst of the staining when he notices Quainton stagger, buckle, and collapse to the floor.

It’s a feeling like panic. The boy’s deceptively heavy in his arms as he tugs him up from the floor, that strange floral smell tickling Bond’s nose when he snugs the slight form against his chest to open the door one-handed. He braces for the looks, the questions, but they don’t come; London’s permissive, but it’s not this permissive, as a familiar checkered cap walks by without even glancing at them. No one is, to be precise, besides perhaps the bum begging change by the stairs who stares in open-mouthed wonder as Bond clutches Quainton close and starts to push through the crowds.

He can’t. He can’t get through—each person he passes is before him again; he can’t remember their faces, but he knows he’s getting nowhere. Quainton stirs against him, trails his fingertips against Bond’s cheek in an embrace before Bond will stop to look at him. “You’re unwell,” Bond tells him, and he can’t explain why he cares, only that he does. “I’m taking you to hospital.”

“I’m fine,” Quainton protests. He wriggles, and Bond has to set him down or risk dropping him. The crowds part around them, an island in the stream, and Quainton flashes him a quick, rueful grin. “I overexerted myself. Did more than I ought, but it’s my own fault.”

“Quainton,” Bond says in warning.

“You should go, James Bond. I shouldn’t let you, but you should.” Quainton doesn’t look around and Bond doesn’t either, but the air changes, shapes and cracks with a feeling like being followed.

“How can I repay you for helping me?” Bond asks. “Come with me.”

“Not today,” Quainton says. His smile is sad. “Just do me a favor?”

“Of course,” Bond agrees instantly. 

“Don’t tell your name to the next three people to ask. Can you do that for me?” Quainton asks, tucking his fingers into Bond’s palm. “Just that.”

It’s a strange request, but Bond nods. Quainton brightens. “Stay safe, James Bond,” Quainton says, and then he’s melting back into the crowd; Bond watches him go and still can’t trace him past twenty meters. It’s as if he’s disappeared.

He’s on his way out of the building when he sees a girl leaning against the wall. She’s so like Quainton: same eyes, somehow, or perhaps it’s the hair, though hers is straight and long until he remembers Quainton’s dark curls. It’s the clothes she wears, even though she looks like a well-to-do kid, not Belgravia but Chelsea perhaps—though she’s filthy, as if she’s been living in the tunnels, and artfully torn like the highest-end fashion. He doesn’t know what to make of her; he has to talk to her at once. 

“You know him,” he tells her, and she looks at him lazily, eyes slow and sharp and tingling.

“Who’s asking?” she sneers back, but.

But she looks interested. There’s a waiting coiled just beneath her skin—a pipe bomb. He’s looking at a pipe bomb. “Mr.,” he starts, and his tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth. “Seven. Mr. Seven.”

And oh, she’s disappointed. He can feel it ebbing from her in waves, and suddenly, he doesn’t know why he needed to talk to her. She’s just a schoolkid, probably waiting for her friends and texting on her mobile like any other kid. He steps back with a frown. “Sorry,” he says. “Thought I knew you.”

The next one’s a few days later. He’s on the tube—unusual—and a busker walks into the car—not unusual. He’s typical of the sort, a starving artist type, fiddle handy; Bond’s skin crawls like ants are on him the moment his eyes land on that battered violin case, and all he can hear is Quainton—“Stay safe, James Bond”—until.

The music is incredible. It’s an old Scottish folksong, something half-remembered from snatches of a dream, familiar as an old friend and twice as dear. He’s tapping his toe almost before he realizes he’s doing it, and the busker gives him a little smile. The song has his rapt attention. The doors open and close, and in the distant background he’s reminded to mind the gap, but he doesn’t notice when Vauxhall Cross comes and goes. Finally the busker drops the violin from his chin; he’s young, thin, with bobbing curls that catch the light even this far underground as Bond follows him from the car. And he waits patiently while Bond tries to figure out what to say.

“Do you,” Bond asks, turning the words over in a head that’s full and sticky with music, “have a CD?” It’s a stupid question; who plays the tube if they’ve an album out these days? But Bond watches hopefully as the busker draws a cheap jewel case from his bag.

“Last one, actually,” he says, and he sounds. His voice sounds. Bond can’t place it.

“How much?” he asks, and the busker’s cheeks dimple charmingly.

“No charge for a fan. I’ll even sign it for you—who should I make it out to?” It’s ice water in Bond’s face.

“It’s for my nan. She’s going to love it,” he says, and the point of the busker’s felt tip pen quivers for a moment before dipping into an elegant loop.

At home, Bond tries to find the disc in his bag and it’s gone. It’s okay; he doesn’t remember the song, either.

“You’re a fool,” says the third, a woman so old she’s little more than a bag of bones. “You could have so much,” she says. “We could give you so much.” He’s run into her near the Marble Arch; there’s a fistful of abandoned stations below their feet, but she’s standing aboveground, shaded by the Reform Tree. She watches him go, snarling.

It takes him a week to remember: Granborough. 

It’s been a long time since he’s been to the country. It’s idyllic; he follows the old track markers until he finds what he’s looking for: the narrow wooden hut that had once been the ticketing office. The tracks are gone, pulled up long ago, the station a museum. He leaves the car behind in the car park and follows the hollowed ruts into the trees.

Quainton smiles up at him beatifically. “I’d wondered,” he says, and Bond can barely think for the smell of wildflowers. There are petals in his hair, woven in and knotted into a crown, and it would be so ridiculous, so Lady Cottington, if Quainton weren’t curling his fingertips behind Bond’s ear to draw their mouths together. “You’ve really made them angry, you know.”

“I know,” Bond murmurs against his lips.

“I’m just as bad as they are,” Quainton says.

“I know.”

“I can make you do anything I want you to do,” Quainton warns.

“I know.”

“And someday you’ll turn to dust.”

“But not today,” Bond says.

“No,” Quainton agrees, smiling. “Not today.”

**Author's Note:**

> Note: Quainton Road is the name of a station on the Metropolitan Line (the stop right before Granborough Road, actually)--the entire line was put out of service in 1935, though the buildings that were in use are still there, just repurposed.
> 
> Also, I hope no one is particularly angry about the un-warned-for Character Death in here, as it's fixed nearly instantly....


End file.
